DVD review: The Heart Is a Drum Machine
Juliette Lewis, Elijah Wood, and more notables explore the relationship of body and soul
By Camille Ikalina Robles
Published: May 10th, 2010 | 11:30am
The Heart Is A Drum Machine (Lightyear Entertainment) is more than just a music documentary. It is, at its core, a love letter to music. More than 25 minutes of the movie features artists, musicians, musicologists, and actors gushing as they describe something that is essentially indescribable. Among the contributors are such industry notables as John Frusciante (Red Hot Chili Peppers), actress-musician Juliette Lewis, MTV's Kurt Loder, and actor-record label owner Elijah Wood, as well as members of Silversun Pickups, Modest Mouse, and MGMT. Often rendered speechless and overwhelmed, each interviewee spends most of the time offering personal metaphors for what they believe music is and how it makes them feel. This part is lovely and endearing and does well to capture the overall theme of the documentary: that music is both unique and universal. But after awhile of this, you want it to move on.
And move on it does. Next, the film discusses how people use music both socially and physically to create a sense of transcendence or for its healing powers to mend a broken heart, and when you're ready to get back in the game, how music can get you laid. It also goes on to explore the feeling that, as humans, music is the best way we can express how we want to be understood—a sentiment that extends all the way to outer space.
In 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 were set free to explore the galaxy. The NASA Interstellar Message Project, headed by creative director Ann Druyan, decided that America's offering to the galaxy and extraterrestrials would be two things: the compositions of some of our most revered musicians and the sound of the human heartbeat. Druyan hoped to show that “passion and longing might be felt in other worlds,” and that in our quest for cosmic citizenship, we might invoke the most “primal reaction to sound.”
The connection of the heart to music and rhythm is what this documentary always comes back to. “The heart and the drum were not two different things,” observes Milton Graves, a professor of music therapy at Bennington College for over 25 years, when the discussion of the drums' origin comes up in his classes. And it always does. Graves, considered to be a pioneer in the free jazz percussion movement of the 1960s, believes the uniqueness of each individual’s heart determines how we perceive music. Enthusiastic students and musicians have often asked Graves to record their heart beats, a now overwhelming collection of unique rhythmic sounds that sit in his home library. According to Graves, sound, like the heart beat, is essentially the essence of life. “Music is an extraction of something that’s much bigger. [Music is] coming from different ways to do the same thing, to cause the body to oscillate. Motion. Life,” says Graves. “And when that stops, forget about it.”
Like love and other mysteries of life, there is no real way to comprehend music. But as The Heart is a Drum Machine proves, this is no unrequited love story. In the end, music fans will keep on gushing, dancing, healing, transcending, and living, because music is the kind of thing that keeps on giving.
Issue #41
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